The Missing of the Somme (9 page)

For those above ground the chief activity recorded on film is carrying. Before the battle, shells; after, stretchers. Life, one realizes, is primarily a question of loading and unloading,
fetching and carrying. Many of the shells are too heavy to be lifted and have to be winched or rolled into position. Every piece of equipment looks like it weighs a ton. There were no
lightweight nylon rucksacks or Gore-tex boots. Things were made of iron and wood, even cloth looks like it has been woven from iron filings. Everything weighed more then. Weighed down
with equipment, men do not march to the front so much as carry themselves there. Greatcoats are not worn but lugged:

This is one of the lessons of history: things get lighter over time. The future may not be better than the past but it will certainly be lighter. Hence the burden, the
weight
of the
past.

We feel this especially strongly when looking at the memorial sculptures of Charles Sargeant Jagger. Some sculptors coax stone into a deceptive lightness; Jagger emphasizes its
heaviness.

In the 1907 relief
Labour
(since destroyed) men strain and sweat to shift a piece of equipment; one figure in the right-hand corner seems exhausted, injured or wounded. Only the
slightest addition of detail would be necessary to render the scene suitable for use as a relief on Jagger’s best-known work, the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner.

We stopped there one night in August. Obscured by trees, isolated for most of the day by a moat of traffic, no one else in the car even knew the memorial was there. There were four of us, all
drunk. It was two in the morning and still warm. Moonlight glanced off the black figures. We
looked up at the figure lugging shells, his gaze fixed blankly into the future or
the past or whatever it is that the present eventually becomes.

‘Men became reminiscent and talkative as they looked at the figure carrying four 18-pound shells in the long pockets of his coat,’ reported the
Manchester Guardian
the
morning after the memorial was unveiled on 18 October 1925.

Even in rest the weight of their equipment drags down on the men. We walked around the memorial, sheltered from the noise of the traffic. At the side of the memorial a figure lay covered by a
greatcoat, part of his face – an ear, the line of his jaw – just visible. He is simply
dead weight
.

Jagger’s distinctive style combines this almost hulking heaviness of stone and equipment with the most delicate of details: you can almost see the hairs on the
shell-carrier’s forearms, hear the rustle of the letter read by the soldier waiting at Paddington station. A scarf wrapped around his neck, a greatcoat draped
around his
shoulders, absorbed in the act of reading. The promise and dread of letters. Propped against the bar of the Café de l’Industrie, I open an envelope with my name in your writing. The
second paragraph wonders, in your latest flourish of colloquial English, how I am ‘bearing up’.

The scale and strength of Jagger’s figures recall the heroes of classical sculpture, but they are utterly ordinary. His sculptures are of average men whose heroism lies
in their endurance. Jagger himself was shot through the left shoulder in Gallipoli in November 1915; in April 1918 he was again badly wounded at the Battle of Neuve Eglise. On both occasions he
made a speedy recovery: ‘I heal,’ he wrote in May 1918, ‘almost before I’ve been hit.’ What he emphasizes in his sculpture is not the body’s vulnerability but
its resilience, its capacity for bearing up. His figures – most obviously in the Hoylake and West Kirby Memorial, or in the identical maquette ‘Wipers’ at the Imperial War Museum
– stand their ground, guarding their own memory. Their backs are, typically and literally, against the wall.

Public sculpture aims to display itself to maximum effect. There is an inherent difficulty, therefore, in using as the basis for such sculpture figures whose main aim was the exact opposite:
maximum concealment. During the day, front-line troops stayed below ground level; only under cover of darkness or during a major offensive did they venture out into the open. Rather than revealing
itself on a plinth, then, an authentic figure should, except on rare occasions, seek cover behind or – ideally – beneath it.

Like almost all of Jagger’s figures the Artillery officers are sheltered and protected by their own Memorial. Only the hunched machine-gunners of Jagger’s Portsmouth Memorial are
framed by open air.

Jagger may have been the best but he was not the only sculptor to benefit from the needs of Remembrance. Commissions for
most of the British memorials in
France were given to architects but at home the post-war period represented a boom period for sculptors. For French sculptors times were even better. Thirty thousand war memorials – or fifty
a day – were raised in France between 1920 and 1925. ‘There hasn’t been a golden age like this since the Greeks, since the cathedrals,’ says a memorial sculptor in
Tavernier’s film
Life and Nothing But
. ‘Even the most ham-fisted sculptor is inundated with commissions. It’s like a factory production line. Talk of the Renaissance,
this is the Resurrection.’

Inherently backward-looking, sponsored, mainly, by the state and the military, Memorial art will always tend to the conservative rather than experimental – even more so when the war to be
commemorated has early on identified ‘tradition’ with England and home, ‘modern’ with the enemy. By implication ‘traditional’ figurative sculpture was readily
compatible with victory, or at least with the milder affirmation that the war had not been utterly devoid of purpose. By similar and paradoxical implication, modernism – in the post-war years
which witnessed its consolidation and triumph – seemed to identify itself with defeat or, more mildly, with hostility to the values in whose name the war had been waged.

Significantly, the principal modernist memorials were designed in Germany, the defeated nation, by Ernst Barlach and Käthe Kollwitz (both of whose work was subsequently condemned by the
Nazis).

In Britain, memorials were executed in the main by older, more established sculptors like Albert Toft (1862–1949) and William Goscombe John (1860–1953). Even the
major commissions undertaken by younger sculptors like Walter Marsden (1882–1969), Gilbert Ledward (1888–1960) and Jagger himself (1885–1934) were cast in traditional
forms.

‘Survivor outrage’ – as James Young terms it – was also a factor determining the essentially conservative nature of memorials. As representatives of the dead, survivors
tend to be hostile to abstract representation of their past: ‘Many survivors believe that the searing reality of their experiences demands as literal a memorial as possible.’ Such
public hostility to the experimental or abstract is not always wrong-headed or philistine. The memorials of Toft and Jagger have endured better than less traditional works, like those of Edward
Kennington for example. Over time his simple totemic forms, crowded on to a plinth in Battersea Park, have been unable to perform the basic function of the Memorial: to give shape to the past, to
contain it.

And yet, from this confluence of needs and socio-aesthetic forces there emerges the possibility of a memorial sculpture which, in Britain at least, never came into existence, which is missing
from the art historical record: a wounded realism, a sculpture rooted in a figurative tradition but maimed by modernism; a memorial sculpture which is both rent asunder and held together by the
historical experience it seeks to express. Such a memorial form might have resembled Zadkine’s
Monument to Rotterdam
, or Ernst Neizvestny’s
Soldier Being Bayoneted
.
These were made in the 1950s but both use ‘a sculptural language which derives from the same period of the early 1920s’.

A work from slightly earlier, Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s
haunting
The Fallen
of 1915–16, shows that sculptural language beginning to express itself in terrible
sobs. A naked, painfully etiolated figure is on his hands and knees. His head hangs to the floor. The grief of Europe seems to bear down on his back but this fallen youth is still supporting
himself, resisting the last increment of collapse (his head touches the floor but this sign of helplessness adds to the sculpture’s structural stability). Another work by Lehmbruck,
Head
of a Thinker
, shows a figure whose arms appear to have been wrenched off, leaving the shoulders as rough stumps; the left hand is clenched against the chest from which it protrudes. Lehmbruck
worked as an orderly in a military hospital in Berlin and was devastated by the injuries and suffering he witnessed. He committed suicide in 1919, but his work might have provided a model for
future memorials.

Similar works – better ones, sculptures stripped of Lehmbruck’s tendency to implicitly elide the suffering of the artist with that of the fallen soldier – could have forced
themselves into existence in the inter-war years in Britain. Alternatively, given that the figurative sculptural tradition is inherently heroic, the possibility existed for a realist sculpture
which showed the suffering of war more nakedly than ever before: a group of men advancing and falling in the face of machine-gun fire, stretcherbearers floundering in mud . . . Sculptures do show
injured soldiers but the wounds tend to be heavily formalized, hindering rather than maiming. The sculptural representation of slaughter exists only in a bas-relief by Jagger. Now in the Imperial
War Museum,
No Man’s Land
of 1919–20 shows a sprawling wilderness of men dying and wounded, one of whom hangs crucified from barbed wire.

That such an explicit depiction of battle was nowhere given fully three-dimensional expression highlights another absence – especially if the bas-relief as a form is
considered as the bronze or stone equivalent of a photograph, as a static tracking shot. While they could convey the aftermath of action, it was physically impossible for photographers to capture
battle itself (one of the reasons the sequence of soldiers going over the top at the Somme is obviously faked is precisely
because
it was filmed); as a medium sculpture was capable of
rendering the unphotographable experience of battle. Although many had the talent, no British sculptor – not even Jagger – had the vision, freedom or power to render the war in bronze
or stone as Owen had done in words.

This speculative account of sculptures that were not made is really only an attempt to articulate a sense of what is missing from those that
were
: a way of describing them in terms not
of stone or bronze but of the time and space which envelop and define them. What is lacking is the sense of a search for a new form, a groping towards new meaning rather than a passive reliance on
the accumulated craft of the past.
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